March 8 was declared International Women’s Day in 1911 (see International Women’s Day 1911-2011) and has evolved in the US into a month-long celebration honoring the contributions of women to the human story. This year, the National Women’s History Project (NWHP) theme for Women’s History Month is Women Inspiring Innovation Through Imagination: Celebrating Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (see this blog’s posts: Science Technology Engineering Math– Stem , Sally Ride 1951-2011, and Developing Literacy page for STEM links).
About 20 years ago, I participated in the Bay Area Science Project (BASP) through Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science. It was a fabulous six-week teacher workshop conducted at St. Mary’s High School in Berkeley. We covered lots of STEM topics, and, explored the FOSS and GEMS programs. A focus of the workshop was to bring hands-on science into the schools. One of the lead instructors brought in a lovely science themed calendar demonstrating one small way to include science on a daily basis in the classroom. Marie Curie was the only woman celebrated in the calendar. I commented about the lack of gender equity in the calendar and was surprised to hear the instructor declare, “Well, there really aren’t any of note.” This was Berkeley! I was motivated to find and share the legions of women scientists who had not received public acclamation for their work. Fast forward 20 years, and I was delighted to read about the STEM theme of Women’s History Month.
NWHP honors 18 STEM women.
The 2013 Honorees represent a remarkable range of accomplishments and a wide diversity of specialties including medicine, robotics, computer programming, atmospheric chemistry, architecture and primatology. These women’s lives and work span the centuries of American history and come from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. We are proud to honor them and all women seeking to advance these important fields.
Drum roll please:
- Hattie Elizabeth Alexander (1901–1968) Pediatrician and Microbiologist
- Marlyn Barrett (1954) K-12 STEM Educator
- Patricia Era Bath (1942) Ophthalmologist and Inventor
- Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) Physician
- Katharine Burr Blodgett (1898–1979) Physicist and Inventor
- Edith Clarke (1883–1959) Electrical Engineer
- Rita R. Colwell (1934) Molecular Microbial Ecologist and Scientific Administrator
- Dian Fossey (1932–1985) Primatologist and Naturalist
- Susan A. Gerbi (1944) Molecular Cell Biologist
- Helen Greiner (1967) Mechanical Engineer and Roboticist
- Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992) Computer Scientist
- Olga Frances Linares (1936) Anthropologist and Archaeologist
- Julia Morgan (1872–1957) Architect
- Louise Pearce (1885–1959) Physician and Pathologist
- Jill Pipher (1955) Mathematician
- Mary G. Ross (1908–2008) Mechanical Engineer
- Susan Solomon (1956) Atmospheric Chemist
- Flossie Wong-Staal (1946) Virologist and Molecular Biologist
Graphic Rosie Tech from Claremont Port Side.
March 8 was declared International Women’s Day in 1911 (see International Women’s Day 1911-2011) and has evolved in the US into a month-long celebration honoring the contributions of women to the human story. This year, the National Women’s History Project (NWHP) theme for Women’s History Month is Women Inspiring Innovation Through Imagination: Celebrating Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (see this blog’s posts: Science Technology Engineering Math– Stem , Sally Ride 1951-2011, and Developing Literacy page for STEM links).
About 20 years ago, I participated in the Bay Area Science Project (BASP) through Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science. It was a fabulous six-week teacher workshop conducted at St. Mary’s High School in Berkeley. We covered lots of STEM topics, and, explored the FOSS and GEMS programs. A focus of the workshop was to bring hands-on science into the schools. One of the lead instructors brought in a lovely science themed calendar demonstrating one small way to include science on a daily basis in the classroom. Marie Curie was the only woman celebrated in the calendar. I commented about the lack of gender equity in the calendar and was surprised to hear the instructor declare, “Well, there really aren’t any of note.” This was Berkeley! I was motivated to find and share the legions of women scientists who had not received public acclamation for their work. Fast forward 20 years, and I was delighted to read about the STEM theme of Women’s History Month.
NWHP honors 18 STEM women.
The 2013 Honorees represent a remarkable range of accomplishments and a wide diversity of specialties including medicine, robotics, computer programming, atmospheric chemistry, architecture and primatology. These women’s lives and work span the centuries of American history and come from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. We are proud to honor them and all women seeking to advance these important fields.
Drum roll please:
- Hattie Elizabeth Alexander (1901–1968) Pediatrician and Microbiologist
- Marlyn Barrett (1954) K-12 STEM Educator
- Patricia Era Bath (1942) Ophthalmologist and Inventor
- Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) Physician
- Katharine Burr Blodgett (1898–1979) Physicist and Inventor
- Edith Clarke (1883–1959) Electrical Engineer
- Rita R. Colwell (1934) Molecular Microbial Ecologist and Scientific Administrator
- Dian Fossey (1932–1985) Primatologist and Naturalist
- Susan A. Gerbi (1944) Molecular Cell Biologist
- Helen Greiner (1967) Mechanical Engineer and Roboticist
- Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992) Computer Scientist
- Olga Frances Linares (1936) Anthropologist and Archaeologist
- Julia Morgan (1872–1957) Architect
- Louise Pearce (1885–1959) Physician and Pathologist
- Jill Pipher (1955) Mathematician
- Mary G. Ross (1908–2008) Mechanical Engineer
- Susan Solomon (1956) Atmospheric Chemist
- Flossie Wong-Staal (1946) Virologist and Molecular Biologist
Graphic Rosie Tech from Claremont Port Side.
By Anatoly Liberman
Here, for a change, I will present two words (cuss and bust) whose origin is known quite well, but their development will allow us to delve into the many and profound mysteries of r. Both Dickens and Thackeray knew (that is, allowed their characters to use) the verb cuss, and no one had has ever had any doubts that cuss means “curse.” Bust is an Americanism, now probably understood everywhere in the English-speaking world. The change of curse and burst to cuss and bust seems trivial only at first sight.
The sound designated in spelling by the letter r differs widely from language to language. Even British r is unlike American r, while German, French, and Scots r have nothing in common with Engl. r and one another. All kinds of changes occur in vowels and consonants adjacent to r. Those who know Swedish or Norwegian are aware of the peculiar pronunciation of the groups spelled rt, rd, rn, and rs. In some Germanic languages, postvocalic r tends to disappear altogether. In British English, it seems to have merged with preceding vowels some time later than the beginning of the seventeenth century, because most dialects of American English have preserved postvocalic r; in their speech, father and farther, pause (paws) and pours are not homophones.
In principle, nothing of any interest happened to Engl. r before s. But when we comb through the entire vocabulary, we occasionally run into puzzling exceptions. Thus, a common word for the waterfall is foss, an alteration of force. This force, unrelated to force “strength, might” (of French descent), is a borrowing from Scandinavian. Old Norse had fors, but in Old Scandinavian the spelling foss already turned up in the Middle Ages, and this is why I mentioned the treatment of rs (among other r-groups) in Swedish and Norwegian. Today in both of them rs sounds like a kind of sh to the ear of an English-speaker. Therefore, one could have expected Engl. fosh rather than foss. Forsch did occur in Middle Low (= northern) German, but the extant English form is only foss.
A similar case is the fish name bass. (I am very happy to return to the fish bowl.) All its cognates have r in the middle: Dutch baars, German Barsch, and so forth. The word is allied to bristle. Apparently, r was lost before s in Old Engl. bærs (æ had the value of a in Modern Engl. ban) but not without a trace, for the previous vowel was lengthened and developed into a diphthong, as in bane and its likes. In the name of the game prisoner’s base (a kind of tag with two teams, as probably everybody knows), base may go back to bars. If so, bass, the bristly fish, and base, the game in which participants find themselves behind “bars,” had a similar history. But the fish name is spelled bass instead of base, and this is one of the strangest spellings even in English (imagine lass and mass pronounced as lace and mace).
A bust of a ruler whose empire went bust.
To be sure, we have another bass “low voice,” also pronounced as base, but at least there is an explanation of that oddity. Italian basso was (quite correctly) identified with base “of low quality” and pronounced like that adjective, with the written image of the noun remaining intact. But why bass, the fish name? I could not find any discussion of this minor problem and will venture a conjecture. We have seen that in fors r was lost, and yet the preceding vowel did not undergo lengthening. Perhaps, once bærs shed r, it existed in two forms, with a short vowel (as happened in foss, from fors) and with a long one. The outcome of the compromise was to pronounce the word according to one form and to spell it according to the other. That is why English spelling is such fun. (Compare heifer: the written image reflects its development in the dialects in which the diphthong has been preserved, but the Standard form sounds heffer.)
Another fish name is dace, from Old French dars. Among the fifteenth-century English spellings we find darce and darse. It may not be due to chance that the loss of r before s occurs in words belonging, among others, to fishermen’s vocabulary and children’s lingo. Analogous cases are known from hunters’ usage. The phonetic change in question looks like a feature of unbuttoned and professional speech, for who would control the sounds of the “lower orders” and of the hunters’ jargon? The Standard treated it as vulgar. But fighting the street is a lost cause, though language does not develop from point A to B, C, and all the way to Z. It rather resembles an erratic pendulum; the norm of today may be rejected tomorrow, so that the conservative variant may prevail.
This is what happened in the history of the word first. In the pronunciation of many eighteenth-century speakers (in England), first was indistinguishable from fust- in fustian. Fust for first is not uncommon in today’s American English, but it is “substandard.” Also in the eighteenth century, nurse, purse, and thirsty occurred even in the language of the educated as nus, pus, and thustee. Shakespeare once has goss for “gorse,” and the idiom as rough as a goss has been recorded in the modern Warwickshire dialect. The devil is always worsted, but the fabric worsted is “wusted.” The place name Worstead is only for the locals to pronounce correctly. Those who are not afraid to be lost in this jungle may compare Worcester (UK), Worchester in Georgia and Massachusetts, and Wooster, Ohio. Rejoice that you are not reading a 1721 ad: “Thust things fust.”
This is then what happened to cuss and bust. Cuss, from curse, never left the low (base?) register, though everybody understands cussed and cussedness without a dictionary. Bust fared better (or worse, depending on the point of view). First (fust), its descent from burst isn’t always clear to the uninitiated, so that it became a word in its own right, rather than a shadow cast by burst. Second, although mildly slangy in the phrase go bust, it won a decisive victory in its derivative buster. (Do many people still remember that Theodore Roosevelt was called Trust Buster?) The word’s popularity was reinforced by Buster Brown, the character and the shoes. The “street” scored an important point — so much so that blockbuster is no longer slang. It may perhaps be called colloquial, but it has no synonym of equal value. A blockbuster is a blockbuster.
Perhaps someone is interested in the origin of bust, as in sculpture or in the ads for those women who suspect that their bust is inferior to that of Mrs. Merdle of Little Dorrit fame. It is a borrowing of Italian busto, a word, I am happy to report, of highly debatable etymology.
Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”
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Image credit: 17th century marble bust, from Florence, Italy, of Vespasian, (9-79), first roman emperor of the flavian dynasty, on display at Château de Vaux le Vicomte, France. Photo by Jebulon, 2010. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
I always skip my blog’s birthday because it’s 4/20 which is on or near Earth Day, the holiday of stoners everywhere, and usually school vacation. So hey, my blog is now eleven! And I write in it much less than I used to. Partly this is because I’ve got a 1000 word/day minimum writing deal with myself getting my book out the door. I just noticed you can pre-order it from Amazon which sort of freaks me out. I set up a page for the book but there’s really nothing there yet. I hope the cover looks okay. Partly I’ve been doing a lot of other things. Though my crazy six weeks of travel is over — with a whimper, not a bang, since I didn’t get to PLA which displeases me — I’ve been doing my tech work in town and started riding my bike around a lot more. Spring is delightful here.
I’m still answering a lot of library-type emails (someone looking for a copy of DDC 20, got one?) and working at MetaFilter which contains more than its share of writing. I seem to be pouring more of my “this is why the digital divide is important” efforts into the book, though I’ve been pulling out little snippets here and there.
And I gave a talk about Open Source and why it’s important to small libraries at a local conference for educators recently. The notes for the talk are here: Solving Problems with FOSS- What works and doesn’t work in Vermont’s Libraries. It was a great talk but I think I aimed it for more of a library-ish audience and teachers and IT folks have different goals. I did get to talk to a lot of people in my region about what sorts of tech things work and don’t work, and saw a great presentation about MYTH-TV, an open source alternative to home DVR stuff. Fascinating stuff. Interesting times.
Photo is from this post at inhabitat about this art exhibit.
Here’s wishing you a Happy Birthday, Jess!
Happy birthday and congratulations. Great accomplishment!
Happy birthday, a lot of thing that i should do, i have learn much harder from You Sir.